Work
Before any of the software, there was the operating. I have spent more than twenty years in real estate, and most of that time I was not selling houses. I was running the thing that let other people sell houses: the systems, the office, the deal that keeps everyone in it. The story below is the one that made me. It is also the reason "operator" is a thing I did under fire, years before it was a word on a website.
It started with a modem. I got my hands on computers around the age of ten, right when AOL showed up and the whole world got a dial tone. I was the kid who wanted to know how the thing worked, not just how to use it. That never went away.
Real estate found me through my dad. He was an agent, and I got pulled in helping him with the technology, and then helping the other agents around him with theirs. Somewhere in the middle of fixing everyone's systems I got hooked on the business itself. We were good at it together. We became the number one real estate agents in the number one Century 21 office in the world. Not the region. The world.
December 2007: we went to Sotheby's. We joined Dyson and Dyson Sotheby's International Realty, because being Sotheby's agents was the thing we had always wanted. We got there right before the floor fell out of the market.
February 2008 is the hinge. The CFO came down to the office and told us it was closing at the end of the month. The market was collapsing, the numbers did not work, and the doors were shutting. My dad and I raised our hands and asked one question: can we buy it?
We could. So we did.
Then we rebuilt it small. We invited twenty of the three hundred agents to come with us. Eighteen said yes. We went from thirty thousand square feet of office to three thousand. We put every one of those eighteen people on the same deal, no games, and we went to work. Within six months, eighteen agents were producing the same amount of commission the full three hundred had produced before.
We grew it for twelve years and sold it. By 2020 we were sixty agents and roughly ten times the revenue we started that rebuild with. That year we sold the company to Majestic Realty Collective.
Majestic kept me on. They brought me in as VP and I ran that for four years. Then they moved me to Utah, where I work now.
I help a network of Sotheby's International Realty affiliated brokerages with their systems, their processes, and their training. Summit is my home brokerage; the work reaches across the other offices in the group. It is the same job I have always done, operating the machine that lets a lot of agents do their best work, at a larger scale.
Handed a closing office in a collapsing market, the reflex was not to find another desk. It was to buy the building. Eighteen people then out-produced three hundred inside of six months. Everything I have built since, the software, the systems, the way I run my own life, is downstream of learning early that the operator is the person who runs toward the problem when the CFO walks in.